Substation reliability in a restructured power system

Regulatory authorities are increasingly adopting performance-based regulation in the deregulated electricity industry. According to these regulations an electric power utility is penalized when a customer is continuously interrupted beyond an acceptable target value and rewarded for providing good reliability. So reliability of a substation plays an important role in the competitive environment. In this paper probability technique has been used for evaluation of reliability of a substation. The method has been based on basic reliability equations for evaluation of reliability in terms of failure rate and annual outage duration. Realistic component failure modes have been included in the reliability evaluation. It has been shown how the bus-section breaker improves the reliability of a substation by reducing outage duration. Expected revenue loss in different cases has also been studied. A generalized computer program has been developed. Case studies on a substation under the west Bengal state electricity transmission company limited of India are presented and discussed.